the batu caves

On our last day of our first stay in KL we ventured out to the Batu Caves. They are caves (how did you guess?) which, when discovered, were turned into a Hindu temple. Oh so many stairs! Batu is a popular pilgrimage site around the Thaipusam festival but what a slap in the face it must be, having walked for miles, to be faced by the two hundred and seventy two steps to the top. And once you've finally scaled them, sweat dripping out of every pore as the sun shines in your face as you ascend you go down some steps, seemingly, just so that they can take you up some more without having to go higher up.
Before you get to the top there is the option to go into the so called Dark Cave. It worked on us, yeah sure we'll pay that to walk through a cave which is dark in order to just stop climbing these damned stairs, maybe it'll even be cool in there. Cool it was, dark it was, stepless...it was not. Fortunately we didn't step in too much guano (bat droppings) as we were provided with torches and a very bouncy, energetic guide (who refered to me as Scott having got confused by Kat's surname. I have now tried being called Scott for nearly an hour, i would not recommend it.) who told us a bit about different cave formations (one of which looked uncannily like the waves painted by Hokusai right down to the spray) and the animals, aside from bats, that could be found there. One of these was the long-legged millipede. Aptly, if not inventively, named it turned out; it was five inches long and three inches wide! We were also told about the spiney millipede which she showed us a photo of. We were then asked to guess how long it was, most people guessed about an inch or three, all except one Finnish guy who reckoned on it being around two foot long. Amazingly it turned out that he was right, it was a metre to a metre and a half long! Skepticism started. Our guide said that if it was called it would also come to the path for feeding and started making a clicking noise to call it. Skepticism remained. We were then asked to help calling it. Some people did. Skepticism persisted. We were told it was in fact only two inches long. Skepticism was validated. Overall the Dark Cave was enjoyable and when we turned off our torches it really was impossible to see your hand in front of your face. This made it all the more beautifully eery when there was a hole through which light could pierce the cave walls and suddenly it made sense why the caves were turned into a temple.
The temple itself was quite nice but slightly overrun with monkeys, one of whom followed me down the steps trying to take my plastic bag of food. He literally ran rings around me but i had the last laugh emerging with the bag intact and so ended our trip to Batu. Next stop Melaka.

If you fancy reading non-travel stuff i have a selection of poetry and discussions on gender, identity and eco-graffiti amongst other topics at alexleclez.blogspot.com